Government: Jerry Brown was sworn in Monday for an unprecedented fourth term as California's Governor, and he offered some impressive goals in his speech that would push California even further toward a renewable future.

Technology: A new mapping project can give Californians a "heads up" about pending energy projects in their neighborhoods, which can help neighbors wield better input into energy decision making that can affect their lives, their property values, and their health.

Technology: A federal agency has given the go-ahead to a power storage project adjacent to Joshua Tree National Park that opponents say could seriously harm both the park's wildlife and local groundwater.

Technology: Imagine a smartphone battery that reached a full charge in a minute or two. A team of researchers has come up with a novel molecular architecture that they say doubles the power storage capacity of commercially available supercapacitors.

Technology: If a proposed decision released Tuesday is approved, the California Public Utilities Commission would prevent utilities from levying most extra fees on solar customers who install batteries to store some of the power their panels generate.

Wind: There's a video making the rounds this week showing a new wind turbine design that its developers claim will be more efficient, less resource-intensive, and safer for wildlife than conventional turbines. But do the claims stand up?

Technology: A new study suggests that pairing carbon with the second most common element in the Earth's crust, silicon, may offer a way to produce efficient, durable "batteries" that could remake the way we think about small-scale power storage.

Solar: Seventeen American startups working on innovation in the solar sector have been awarded grants from the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) to further their research -- and eight of those companies are based in California.

The Grid: A ruling by a state commission requires the state's largest utilities to develop more than 1,300 megawatts of electrical power storage by 2020 but doesn't specify an actual capacity for that storage. That's led some tech-savvy members of the public to raise an eyebrow, but one expert says that's not a huge problem.

Solar: Richmond-based Alion Energy is proposing to automate both construction and maintenance of large solar facilities, using robots instead of skilled workers to put solar panels in place and keep them clean.

Photovoltaic (PV): A team in Australia has developed a way to create inexpensive solar cells using a standard industrial printer, offering the possibility of incredibly cheap photovoltaic cells -- but there are a couple of reasons not to declare the solar revolution over.

Wind: It sounds like a flight of fantasy: mount wind turbine generators on gigantic kites, then fly them a thousand feet off the ground to generate power. But one company pushing this literal "blue sky" concept got a huge real-world vote of confidence recently: Google bought them.

Technology: The notion of capturing waste heat from our technology and using it to generate electrical power isn't new. But a team of scientists at UCLA has come up with a new spin on the practice, using a branch of applied physics that didn't even exist 40 years ago.

Technology: One of the main obstacles to greater use of renewables is the fact that the cheapest forms of renewable energy, solar and wind, don't offer power 24/7. Without an effective way of storing surplus energy when the sun's out and the wind's blowing, those readily available renewables don't help much on windless nights.
A San Francisco-based company hopes to offer a practical way out of that problem by using high tech to fine-tune a technology we've used since the Stone Age: the flywheel.

Technology: Add another item to the growing buzz about graphene, which ReWire has covered quite recently: in addition to being a promising candidate for electrical power storage, the single-atom thin sheet form of carbon may offer a way to squeeze a whole lot more power out of photovoltaic cells.

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